Hollywood has reached the point where every filmmaker must answer the modern question: to AI or not to AI, preferably before the robots start asking it for them. As AI becomes cinema’s newest source of fascination, suspicion, and existential hand-wringing, Danny Boyle’s Ink, the much-anticipated biographical drama that opened the 83rd Venice Film Festival, has now joined the argument.

Boyle has confessed that AI did sneak into Ink, although only in small doses, while he considers where the technology should draw its creative line.

Danny Boyle offered a measured take on artificial intelligence while speaking to Vanity Fair at the Telluride Film Festival, pointing to Ink as an example of how he actually uses the technology. Around 30 seconds of the film uses AI to animate old photographs, bringing static images subtly to life as part of the movie's visual effects.

“It doesn't really matter what I think about AI. It matters what 20-year-olds think about it is the honest truth,” Danny Boyle said, acknowledging that younger generations will ultimately shape how the technology is understood and used. For him, AI can be a useful filmmaking tool, provided it is handled respectfully and actors are paid when their likenesses are involved.

Danny Boyle told Vanity Fair that he also sees another practical application in AI-generated animals, particularly after his experience with PETA over the chimpanzees featured at the beginning of 28 Days Later. Speaking to Vanity Fair, the filmmaker recalled being told never to repeat the practice and subsequently turning to "CG" animals instead. This time, AI helped create the mice scurrying around the newsroom in Ink.

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With that, Danny Boyle, honored with a directorial achievement at Venice, gives AI a cautious welcome rather than a blank check.

Danny Boyle has plenty of company in his belief that AI need not be cinema’s mortal enemy, provided somebody remembers to keep it on a leash. Robert Zemeckis has used the technology to make Tom Hanks and Robin Wright look younger, while James Cameron welcomes its technical possibilities but draws the line at handing storytelling to a machine. So far, humanity keeps the director’s chair.

The more cautious crowd simply prefers stronger locks on the toolbox. Fran Drescher and SAG-AFTRA have demanded consent and compensation for performers, while Justine Triet has challenged automation that threatens human livelihoods. Christopher Nolan and Guillermo del Toro are considerably gloomier about AI’s ambitions, but the underlying anxiety is remarkably similar: technology is useful right up until it starts deciding what humans are worth. And that is precisely where Danny Boyle plants his flag: AI can help make the movie, but it should never become the movie.

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